


The Motif of Pain

by M_L_Davis



Series: The Masterpiece of Will Shaw [3]
Category: The Cold Light of Day (2012)
Genre: Bedwetting, Cheating, Child Neglect, F/M, Past Child Abuse, Past Rape/Non-con, Smoking, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-03
Updated: 2019-06-03
Packaged: 2020-04-07 10:02:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19082779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/M_L_Davis/pseuds/M_L_Davis
Summary: Laurie wishes, just once, that her son still needed her instead of fearing her.





	The Motif of Pain

* * *

 

Will refuses to look at her at all during the drive to Dr. Cyrill’s offices.

Laurie sighs. She’s so tired of this and it’s only been a few weeks.

The therapist had immediately suggested a psychiatrist, and now, Will has a few appointments a week to go to Dr. Cyrill’s office and talk.

Laurie isn’t sure it’s doing any good. Will is sullen, angry. He hardly speaks to any of them anymore, and whenever Martin is home, he hides.

She doesn’t blame him. His relationship with his father has never been easy. It’s even more strained now that Martin can’t look at his son without a curled hand or lip, as if what happened to their son disgusts him so much that he can’t separate the act from their little boy.

Will opens his car door before she even has the vehicle in park, and the chastisement dies on her lips when she realizes that he’s breathing deeply, shoulders squared, trying to be brave.

“Will, do you want me to come in?”

He shakes his head, marching toward the doors like he’s going to war. She asks every time even though the answer has never changed.

One day, just for once, she wants him to need her again.

He turns at the threshold, and she sees the fear painted on his face, the pain in his eyes, and then he turns around and disappears into the building.

Laurie pulls into a parking space and then leans against the car and smokes her secret stash of cigarettes waiting for him.

Thirty minutes later, Will reappears, dragging his feet as he scans the parking lot until he sees her.

He catches her stubbing out the last butt, but he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t speak to her. In fact, Josh is usually the go-between for them. Josh has day-camp right now otherwise, Laurie would have dragged him with them, if only to feel less alone while she waited.

Will sits, back straight, hands in his lap. His fingers are red, like he’s been twisting them. He doesn’t do anything in front of her. Too afraid of showing weakness, she thinks.

“How was it today?” She has to clear her throat a few times before the words break loose. Will doesn’t look at her. “Did Dr. Cyrril say anything?”

No response.

She wasn’t expecting one. It still hurts though that he won’t trust her with this.

It hurts that even though she did nothing wrong, that she loves him, and treats him so well, he still prefers Martin over her. He will talk to his father on occasion, usually short, monosyllabic answers that are more grunts than words. He speaks to her husband who is incapable of telling Will that he loves him or that he’s proud of him.

Every word out of her husband’s mouth is designed to cut her son to the quick, leave him bleeding as much as if he’d stabbed him.

Why is she the one being treated as if she’s twisting the knife?

Laurie puts the car in drive and pulls out of the clinic’s lot. She needs more smokes, but she won’t get them while she has her son.

They’re halfway home before Will shifts, rolling his shoulders. “Dr. Cyrill wants to try hypnosis,” he mumbles, the words almost lost under the sound of the tires.

Laurie tries not to feel elated at hearing his voice directed at her for the first time in weeks, months even.

Then what he said catches up to her. “Hypnosis? That crackpot, unfounded treatment? Whatever for?”

“He thinks it will help with the nightmares.”

Laurie snaps her mouth shut. They haven’t been talking about how Will has to strip his bed every morning. His sheets have been washed so many times that they’re already worn thin.

She nods tightly. If it helps, she’ll tout the miracle of hypnosis until the end of her days. She just wants her son back. She wants to kill the bitch that stole him from her.

When they pull into the driveway, Martin and Josh are back from their engagements. Martin looks like he needs to take the biggest dump of his life when Will climbs out of the car. Josh looks between his parents before shrugging and asking his brother if he wants to shoot hoops around back. They lope away, knocking shoulders every other step.

“What’d the doc say?” Martin demands as soon as the boys are out of earshot.

Laurie shrugs. “He said we need to try harder with Will.”

“Oh bullshit,” Martin counters immediately. “Do you want me to call them? Get the truth?”

“Fine. Go ahead. Do whatever you like. It’s what you always do.”

Laurie knows about the other women that Martin likes. There’s nowhere he goes that he doesn’t have some well-boned broad hanging off his arm.

Sometimes he lies and tells her it was for his cover. He was married, with kids. What would the enemy think if he didn’t kiss his “wife” on the lips, if they weren’t busted in the act of fucking?

Laurie knows Martin has a problem. She’s working on forgiving him. Until then, no woman that isn’t her friend is allowed in her house. Less so now that Will flinches at even her shadow.

“He says he wants to try hypnosis,” she says before Martin can go inside and call Dr. Cyrill’s offices. “Will said he thinks it’ll help with the…the nightmares.”

“The nightmares, right.” Martin looks as disgusted as she’d felt when she realized the psychiatrist, to whom they pay a very pretty penny, wanted to experiment on her son.

“Has it gotten worse?” he asks quietly. Of course, he’s not home enough to realize that Will can’t go two nights in a row without soaking his bed. She had to go to the hardware store and buy a tarp to save the bed.

“It’s always worse.”

“Well, hypnosis? What’s that supposed to do?”

“Fuck if I know.”

Martin stares at her as if she’s a stranger. Maybe she is. She doesn’t swear in front of him. She still won’t fart in his presence.

“What do we do?”

Laurie rolls her shoulders, feels the pinch of stress crawling down her spine. “We do what we always have: we survive.”

Martin steps up to her, wraps her in his arms, presses his face into her hair, and sighs. “Yeah, but what will be left?”

Laurie lets him pretend to take comfort from him the same way she pretends to take it from him. She has no answer. Why would she? She’s the one who let it happen to her son. She’s the one who stays home, watching at the window as her boys and her husband all get to leave and explore. Why would God be kind enough to show them their salvation when he’s already taken so much from her boy?

Laurie lifts her eyes skyward. She sneers at the bright sky, the sunlight falling over them. If there is a God, he’s certainly not _her_ God. “We’ll do the hypnosis,” she says, a promise, a threat. “We’ll do it, and we’ll survive, and we’ll come out stronger for it.”

God’s trial wasn’t hers or her son’s. It was His, and He failed. He’s just lost one more lamb.

Laurie tests her teeth on the edge of her belief and finds it lacking.

God doesn’t care about her son or her family. So she won’t care about God.

“I need a smoke,” she tells Martin, shrugging off his arms. She walks back to the car, head held high.

Martin lets her go.

As she climbs behind the wheel, she realizes that she still loves him. She’ll still fight for him. She’ll fight for her whole family. Her son will learn that he is not alone and that she has not forsaken him.

Now she just needs to find out who that bitch is so she can rip her fucking head off.

It’s nothing less than what Will deserves.

It’s what she deserves.

* * *

 


End file.
